The Toronto Raptors saved their season on Sunday night. On Tuesday night, they saved it again, and in the most unlikely way imaginable.

With Kawhi Leonard clearly feeling the effects of some kind of leg injury and moving at times like the Tin Man in serious need of some oil, it was all the other Raptors who reversed the usual story of these playoffs, and carried him to a massive 120-102 Game 4 victory.

Six Raptors scored in double-digits, with Kyle Lowry (25) and Norm Powell (18) leading the way on offence, while the entire team put in a tremendous defensive effort, surviving a hot start from the Milwaukee Bucks to hand the 60-win visitors only their second two-game losing streak of the entire season. Entering Tuesday night, the Bucks were 22-1 coming off losses.

A dejected Milwaukee Bucks bench with third starting five sitting late in the fourth quarter in Toronto, Ont. on Tuesday May 21, 2019. Jack Boland/Toronto Sun/Postmedia NetworkJack Boland/Jack Boland/Toronto Sun

(PHOTOS) Raptors bench blow out Bucks in Game 4

The Toronto win, which goes immediately on the very short list of biggest in franchise history, sends the series back to Wisconsin tied at 2-2, and puts the pressure squarely on Milwaukee, a team that had gone 10-1 in the playoffs until arriving in Toronto last weekend. The Raptors now avoid a 3-1 hole and the grim prospect of needing to beat the Bucks three straight.

They also need to hope that whatever ails Leonard improves over the next couple of days, before Game 5 on Thursday night. He finished with 19 gutty points and seven rebounds, most of it the result of a fairly remarkable demonstration of determination. They didn’t need him to be his all-world best on this night, but they will if they are going to swipe a game at the Fiserv Forum.

That the Raptors have evened the series is at least something of a surprise after the events of last week in Milwaukee. Toronto dropped a game it should have won to open the series and then was flattened in Game 2, with the Bucks scoring at will for most of the contest. Even after the Raptors’ double-overtime Game 3 win, the home team hadn’t been totally convincing. Milwaukee missed a ton of shots, and they still had Antetokounmpo, one of the toughest people to defend on the planet.

Three games is not nearly enough of a sample size for a definitive answer, but throw in Milwaukee’s 3-1 record against Toronto in the regular season, plus the 10-2 record in these playoffs entering Tuesday against Toronto’s 9-6, and there was enough evidence for at least some kind of conclusion. The Bucks looked to be the better team, by a small margin. They are deeper and have shown the ability to get scoring from all over their roster, while the Raptors other than Leonard have been up and down like a heart monitor in this post-season.

That’s not to say that the series was over before Game 4 tipped off, but it was evident that some combination of things would have to happen for the Raptors to become one of the few teams that were able to pull out a series after falling into a 0-2 hole.

Leonard would have to keep being Leonard, which would normally be a reasonable assumption for someone with a playoff resume as good as his, but given the minutes he has played, and his huge impact on offence and defence, it’s also reasonable to assume the guy might be a little pooped.

The Raptors would also need bigger contributions from the non-Kawhi members of the team. Danny Green would have to find his shot, or Fred VanVleet would have to find his, or some combination of players who had some good moments against the Bucks would have to have even more of them.

And, on the other end of the floor, they had to avoid an offensive explosion from the Bucks of the type that overwhelmed the Raptors in Game 2. Through three games they had slowed Milwaukee’s half-court offence down considerably, led by Leonard’s stellar defence on Antetokounmpo, but the Bucks had already demonstrated that they had a bunch of guys capable of going on game-breaking runs against the Raptors. Brook Lopez in Game 1, Ersan Ilyasova in Game 2, while Malcolm Brogdon and George Hill had been solid throughout.

All of it added up to a broader looming question for the Raptors, as they headed into Tuesday night. It was also a simple question: Could they play better, while preventing Milwaukee from doing the same?

There were early answers to at least some of those questions on Tuesday night. The Raptors finally had stellar bench play, and from not just one guy but all three of the reserves that Nick Nurse has dared to use in the playoffs when the games were still on the line. Norm Powell hit a couple of early three-pointers on the way to 10 first-half points, Serge Ibaka scored 12 in the half, including on a pair of rim-rocking dunks that sent Scotiabank Arena into mild euphoria. Even more shockingly, VanVleet drilled his first two three-point attempts, after a 1-for-11 performance from the field in Game 3 that, coupled with other recent playoff performances from the former leader of Toronto’s bench unit, was starting to feel like a 1-for-75 streak. The Raptors’ bench outscored the Bucks reserves 28-8 in the first two quarters, allowing Toronto to get to the break with a 10-point lead, 65-55.

Those trends carried over into the second half and, boom, we have ourselves a series. The Eastern Conference final is on.

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